


Inexplicable Adventures for Dummies

by Kandelaar



Category: Pocket Monsters | Pokemon - All Media Types, Worm - Wildbow
Genre: Adventure, Alt!Power Taylor, Alternate Universe, Being Taylor doesn't always mean suffering okay, Gen, Maybe? Sort of? It's weird okay, She can have nice things, sort of
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-10-21
Updated: 2016-10-21
Packaged: 2018-08-23 18:46:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,137
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8338675
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kandelaar/pseuds/Kandelaar
Summary: Taylor isn't sure whether the universe is messing with her or if she just happened to be the favorite victim of the creepiest cape ever. Whichever it is, she's not sure she wants it to stop. The funny creatures that only she can see are kind of neat and the magical ID-card the old guy gave her fixed a lot of problems. If only she knew where to get those badges the guide spoke of, because as far as she knew gyms weren't the girl scouts, handing out badges for managing to run five miles on a treadmill.





	

The man’s face came out of nowhere, hovering just centimeters away from mine.

“Hello!” His voice echoed oddly. “My name is professor Oak, now tell me … are you a boy or a girl?” 

I did the only sane girl any underage girl raised by an overworked but also over-worried father in a crime-riddled city would do: I screamed. The man’s face didn’t move, so I did. In my hurry to get away from this sudden, unwanted addition to my bedroom decor, I tumbled off my bed and onto the floor. Looking up, the man was gone.

“Jesus, Taylor-“ my dad shouted, rushing in through the door. “Are you alright?”

I crawled up from the floor, and pointed a shaking finger at where I had last seen him standing over me. “There was a man there, dad, I swear. He was in my room and looking at me and oh my god how did he get in?”

 My dad looked over my room, his eyebrows drawn together in a frown that shaded his tired eyes. He looked old like this, old and worn. He checked my window, which was locked, and even went downstairs to check both front and back doors, which were locked as well. I had, in the meantime, wrapped a blanket around my shoulders and went over to check the windows downstairs as well. Not a single one of them looked like anyone, let alone a creepy old man, had recently used them to freak out young girls. That left only one option.

“Dad-“ I began.

 My dad opened his mouth at the same time. “Taylor.”

 “You go first.”

“No, go ahead, you go first.”

Dad looked sheepish, rubbing at the back of his bald head and resolutely not looking at me. “Did you take your meds before you went to bed last night?”

_Yes, I think it was a cape too-_ wait? What? My meds? He thought I was, oh no. No. I hadn’t imagined this in some druggy, weird medication side effect induced hallucination. I frowned at him, he frowned back. That was a thing I guess we did a lot, not talking and just looking and then misunderstanding each other. It wasn’t good, neither of us liked it, but we did it nevertheless.

“Dad.”  


“Taylor.”

I breathed in. “It wasn’t a weird dream, dad, _it wasn’t_. I wasn’t even sleeping; I was reading through some books for a test I have next Tuesday.” My arm waved around to point at said textbooks before I remembered we were in the living room now, and my books were still upstairs. This probably wasn’t helping my case to prove that I hadn’t just had the craziest kind of hallucination ever.

“Drink some water and try to catch a bit more sleep, okay? Nothing happened, you must have been really out if it.”

Neither of us said anything else, preferring to just shoot each other that awkward, close-lipped smile-grimace you usually shoot vaguely familiar strangers or distant neighbours when passing down the street. When I closed my bedroom door behind me, I swore I could hear a muffled ‘goodnight, Taylor!’. I shouted something back half-heartedly, hoping I hadn’t misheard, and went to check my sole window _again_. It was locked, as it had been ten minutes before, like usual. Then I stalked over to the innocuous case of pills still lying on my nightstand. I pulled out the intricately folded sheet of paper that everyone ought to read before taking them (yet no one ever did) and I started reading it.

It ended up in my trashcan not ten minutes and a short google search later. Hallucinations were not a side effect. I hadn’t been in some drug-induced haze, I hadn’t imagined it, it had been _real_.

* * *

 

 Some people are accosted by hordes of screaming fans, others by underappreciated housewives trying to get that last cabbage on sale, and yet others by rabid classmates intent on making your life at High School a living hell, filling it with violence and taunts and biological waste. Fortunately, only one out of three applied to me. Unfortunately, I had a new category to add: ‘creepy old men’. It had happened again, some two odd weeks after the first incident, and this time it was worse. I had just opened the door to one of the stalls in the library’s bathroom when I saw him. Standing there. In the very stall whose door I had just opened.

“Hello again! It’s time to start your adventure, so please tell me: are you a boy or are you a girl?”

He smiled, I swallowed a whimper. That said, he had followed me into a girl’s bathroom to creep on me so how could he possibly not now that I was a girl? Then the reality of this old man stalking me all the way into a secluded, empty bathroom to creep on me hit me like a freight train, or an angry, ramped-up Lung.

I screamed, or tried to, because the man had a hand clamped over my mouth.

“Shhh.” A wrinkly finger moved to his lips. “I hate it when they do this. Now nod your head, boy? No? Are you sure? Not a boy? _Really?_ Girl then? Well, okay. Now tell me your name.”

The hand left my mouth. I tasted old people. I smelled old people. I wanted him gone and away and maybe I was just a bit out of it because I answered. “Taylor.”

“Taylor?” I nodded frantically. “Right then, Taylor it is. Now pick one.”

A bag with weirdly coloured tennis balls was held out to me. He jiggled it impatiently when I didn’t move. “Pick one, ungrateful shrimp.”

Humour the crazy old man, humour the crazy old man. That’s what they always said if someone held you at gunpoint, just play along. So I swallowed my nerves, moved my hand forward to the bag and _grabbed_. My fingers didn’t grasp the soft, slightly textured feel I’d expected from the tennis balls’ look-a-like. This was smooth and cold to the touch. My fingers curled around one and I pulled my hand back.

“Great. Here, have a pokédex, some pokéballs to start you off and the standard introductory booklet. Yada yada yada, try not to get yourself killed, go be a hero, or not. This started getting old after the sixth restraining order.” He dumped an armload of stuff in my arms and then turned, as if to leave, while the question I’d been asking myself blurted out of my mouth.

“What is all this?”

He turned back to me, and smiled. It was not a nice smile. “There’s a place and time for everything, but not now.”

A blink later, and he was gone. The stuff I had piled in my arms, however, was still there.

 

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> Sorry? Not sorry? I'm not sure, blame my flu.
> 
> Also, I'm not even going to pretend to get Taylor's character right. I'm a happy person at heart, unless writing heavy angst which I can do but only when feeling sad myself, which I'm not often. So there's that, don't take this seriously, I'm not half the author Wildbow is. 
> 
> Oh, with regards to just how this happened (because I lurk on the 'serious' fora which have the majority of Worm fics but am too much of a delicate dandelion to dare venture out and actually, you know, say stuff) ... handwavium. It's an author's magical means of saying 'yes, I just did that' and not bothering to explain. Also, no pairings. Nope nope nope. 
> 
> Hope you liked it!


End file.
